Abstract

Why, despite all of the inspiring rhetoric in support of human rights, do flagrant violations endure? Enforcement, treaty ratification, geopolitics, and economic concerns are all very important pieces of this puzzle that have been addressed by others. In this project, though, I look at the historical formation of the modern international human rights concept itself to better understand how its own constitution has affected its application. I approach the issue from a unique perspective; namely, I travel back to its “moments of origin” and explore the multiple forces of social resistance that materialized against the formation of the International Bill of Human Rights between 1944 and 1966—a period considered by scholars to be most formative in the establishment of the contemporary human rights regime. Though human rights today might seem like the only appropriate response to the Holocaust and World War II, at the time the concept was anything but self-evident—this empirical analysis reveals a multitude of serious reservations that are often overlooked by human rights scholars. Because the human rights concept promised (or threatened) to create new categories of rights holders, imperial powers such as Great Britain and influential professional organizations such as the American Bar Association and the American Medical Association had serious reservations about the emergent universal human rights concept. In this project I ask, what impact, if any, did these strands of resistance have on the International Bill of Human Rights? To study this question, I construct a series of parallel narratives—each corresponding to an important category of resistance. I create a sociological framework that views the process of human rights formation as a series of struggles over competing social relationships. I argue that the modern human rights concept has been shaped by both positive support and (paradoxically) its opposition. Following World War II, the human rights concept fostered a vital consensus-building process by absorbing oppositional elements into its unitary frame. Thus from its inception, the concept has been encumbered by a series of “internal contradictions” that have created enduring structures that today enable rhetorical praise for human rights, while constraining their enforcement.